The Best Scene in Oldboy

Every Wednesday we show you a great scene from film history you may remember, you may not — and then we break it down for you.

Why is Spike Lee remaking Oldboy? That's the question on the table now that the trailer's been released. It's only been a decade since the Korean director Park Chan-wook's masterpiece of pop violence opened up a new generation to Asian cinema. It's not like the original isn't available or anything. You can rent it anywhere. There are like four different DVD versions. Why bother giving it an English language redux?

So here's an exercise: Watch Oldboy with the sound and subtitles off. It's surprising how well it works, its images devoid of content (or at least language). Take the film's grisliest, most jaw-droppingly memorable scene, in which the vengeful Korean businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) rips through a hallway of bad guys, armed only with a claw hammer. Instead of slicing through them like a superhero, Oh Dae-su takes a consistent licking. He tumbles over, he plays dead, he meanders along, cranking guys in the face while a knife is jammed in his back, bedraggled and possessed. That whole movie poster tagline idea of there being "nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose" is about this guy.

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Filmed in a gliding, three-plus-minute unbroken take, the tussle's reminiscent of old Super Nintendo beat-'em-up games. But it works just as well as a standalone piece of energetic installation art: figures moving through space, pummeling, kicking, flailing. Pure geometry.